00:00 Hello. Good afternoon, and welcome to CIO Leadership Live. I’m your host, Maryfran Johnson, CEO of Maryfran Johnson Media and the former editor in chief of CIO magazine. Since November 2017 this video show and audio podcast has been produced by the editors of CIO.com and the digital media division of foundry, which is an IDG company. Our sponsor for this episode is Veeam Software, a global market leader in data resilience. Veeam delivers a wide range of solutions for data backup and recovery, data portability and security and data intelligence. Veeam leaders believe that every business should be able to bounce forward after a data disruption with confidence and control wherever and whenever they need it, headquartered outside Seattle, Washington with offices in more than 30 countries. Veeam protects more than 550,000 customers worldwide, including 74% of the global 2000 to learn more, visit veeam.com website. Now onward to today’s guest, I’m joined today by Veeam Software, CIO Nathan Kurtz Nate joined Veeam in June of 2022 he leads the corporate technology team and is responsible for the company’s global business systems and all of its internal technologies. Prior to Veeam, he led the Technology Services team at F5 networks, where he spent more than 10 years leading it through periods of significant growth and helping to transform overall customer and employee experience at this rapidly growing tech provider before F5 networks, Nate spent 11 plus years at Arthur Andersen and KPMG serving as part of the global technology and telecommunication practices, where he led both sales and delivery teams for many of their high tech customers, including Microsoft and Amazon. Nate, welcome. It’s wonderful to have you here today. Thanks,
Maryfran, really nice to be here as well. Thanks for for inviting me.
Okay, well, I’m going to take full advantage of your expertise with my first question here about data resiliency. Now, what does that term mean to your seat CIO customers today, versus the data backup and data storage needs a kind of data housekeeping that we’ve all heard about for many, many years in the industry. When you talk about data resiliency, what exactly are we talking about?
Yeah, so I think, you know, in my my career in tech, I think if you were to go back 1015, years, people tended to talk about, like you said, data backup and recovery. It was pretty basic kind of cut and dry. I think, though, as as this space has evolved and we start talking about data resiliency, it’s become more and more important as time has has gone on, as a CIO, we can recover applications and systems pretty quick. What we can never recover or recreate is our data. And so this is the one area. This is truly the keys to what we are responsible for is is recovering that data in a very complex environment, too. And so it’s the world is becoming more complex. The amount of data that we have as a world is growing. It’s doubling every year. I think the last term I heard was 150 zettabytes. And it’s, continuing to expand. And so not only do we have this rapid growth of data, but we also have growth and complexity in terms of the number of of systems, cloud providers, and where it’s all residing. And so with all this, I would say that macro level environment, in terms of our data, it’s just become more and more critical to be resilient when it comes to it. And for Veeam, we we use this bounce forward slogan because we want, we want our products, but we also want the industry as a whole to be able to very quickly be resilient and recover if there is an incident with their data.
Well, you mentioned that in years past, once you could recover applications, but data would be lost. Talk a little bit about the kind of protections that are in place today. I take it that as technologies have evolved, the problem of losing that data forever. I mean, we’re not talking about ransomware here. We’re talking about data that is harmed in a disruption. What is it about technologies and the advances of them that are protecting that data better today? Yeah,
yeah. So we tend to, we tend to think of it in a framework, type approach. Sure And so, and I think, I think we’ve kind of talked about this a little bit already, but we tend to think of it in kind of five pillars. When you have just your your basic data backup, are you? Are you on a at the frequency that you want? Are you storing your your data within your systems? But then are you able? The next kind of pillar would be recovery. Are you able to bring it back? Then we get into the areas that I think you’re you’re really asking about, which is on that data portability. Can you recover data from any anywhere to anywhere? Because we’re in a very like I mentioned, a complex environment where we have information being stored both in systems. They could be local, in your own data center. They could be at a Co Location facility where you have a hosted data center. They could be in the cloud, you know, the major cloud providers being AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and so forth. Can you recover between those then we get into data security, and that’s kind of that fourth pillar that we tend to think about, which is, when you have your information stored somewhere, does it have integrity? Is it? Is it free from I guess the common term would be, you know you could, we’ve talked about like viruses or ransomware. Do you know that it has you have assurances and trust in that data, and that’s what these products today are allowing CIOs to have, is we know that these where our data sits, there’s a high degree of trust and integrity to it, so that when we recover it, we’re not reintroducing the problem back and then lastly, or that the fifth pillar would be on intelligence, with the emergence of AI, there is an enormous amount of new insights we are getting on our data, not only in terms of how do we more better protect it, to keep it resilient, but also, what insights do we have, maybe, to drive product and revenue growth within our own companies. And so it’s just, it’s a really exciting time, I think, to be in this space and and it’s only going to continue to be exciting
going forward. Yes, well, and it seems it’s very joined at the hip with everything that people talk about around cyber security. I mean, the cyber security conversations I’ve had with other CIOs always involve that protection and recovery of data and, of course, customer privacy and those sort of things. But it seems like the flip side of the security and privacy coin has become the data protections that companies and technology providers can offer out in the market. I wanted to ask you next I wondered, and this may be my own assumption, and so correct me, but is the intensifying AI driven focus on enterprise data these days? Has that had an impact on Veeam zone business or on the needs of your customers? Is I mean, I feel like, I feel like it’s a federal law now that we can’t go more than 10 minutes into a conversation with the CIO without bringing up AI. But the AI intensity and the need for the high quality data all seems to play into what you’ve been talking about as well. Yeah,
absolutely. So if we talk about just AI at a top level, it is only going to give you insights based on quality, accurate, complete information that you’re providing to it. And so you can, you can run AI models on on all the data sets you want, but if it doesn’t have that integrity and accuracy, it’s when you, when you enter in your prompt, it’s going to respond with what we call like a hallucination, or something that’s that’s not correct. Pretty entertaining term, actually,
that it is that’s, I mean, maybe the first time
I’ve ever heard hallucinations talked about in the tech industry,
yeah. And that’s why, whenever you get a prompt or you get a response to AI, it always says, hey, you know, check this. Make sure it’s accurate before you actually take it as the truth, because it can return false answers and so forth, or false insights. But we tend to think of AI within, within Veeam, I think it’s really in two areas. One, it’s on our product side and what we’re providing to our customers. And this can be, this is embedded within our product that helps with that data resiliency that we talked about. It also could be as simple as, how can we more efficiently support our customers through our support organization? If they’re having, let’s say, questions or things they need to resolve with our own products that we’re offering them. Can they leverage AI capabilities to gain insights quick so they can resolve their issues sooner? Then internally, we have our own set of AI tools that we’re using just to better the efficiency and the product. Activity of our own company, and so I think that’s really where my focus has been over the last couple of years. When it comes to AI, we have a variety of tools, and what I’m continuing to see is every key software player out there, I’m sure everybody knows they have their own AI capabilities, and the challenge is, how do you stitch those together? How do you create a cohesive experience for your employees, and so you’re not having a bunch of disconnected experiences. The worst two would be if you go into one, let’s say, AI module, prompt it, and then you go into another one, and you get two different answers, or conflicting answers, and so you want to make sure that you have a really good governance process in terms of how we’re going to use it, where we’re going to use it, what the data is, and so forth.
And when you talk about, and I know we discussed this as we were getting ready for this interview, you talked about, when we were talking about data quality, you mentioned the importance of having a cohesive AI strategy. What does What does cohesive mean in that context? What is it that holds an AI strategy together? And is this something that you find yourself talking with other CIO customers about a lot these
days? Yeah, so I have been on on a few round tables these days. I think it at the start, you always need to start with what’s the employee or the customer experience you want, and then work back from there. And I think, and that’s really where I’m talking about, a cohesive strategy, is you want to have that customer journey, whether it be how we transact with our customers, how we support our customers, and you want to think of it in those terms, and then work your way back in terms of what are the AI capabilities that you have, and then where’s the right fit for each of those as you work through those customer or employee journeys. And so it’s taking more of a customer centric view and working your way back into the into the AI tooling.
Okay. Well, you’d also mentioned that one of the other concepts you end up talking with a lot of companies about is monetizing their data, and the role that, of course, data resiliency and data recovery would be pretty important in that, especially if you’ve got price tags on things where you’re dealing with your end user customers.
Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so I’ll just, I’ll speak for being. I mean, we are, we are starting to introduce solutions where we’re actually storing our customers data as part of their their resiliency. And so we have, we have an enormous amount of information, and being able to provide that information back to your customers, for them to get insight into how their business is operating, I think, is a real value proposition that we have, I think too, when it comes to to to customer data. There’s an ethical responsibility that we have when it comes to to that our our customers trust us to to operate in an ethical manner. And I think as your work as companies are thinking about monetizing their own customers information, they really need to put ethics at the forefront, just like with our own personal information. In our personal lives, we want to know that wherever it’s sent, or wherever it’s stored, it’s being safeguarded and treated in an ethical manner. I think that’s something that we continue to focus on. Okay, good.
That makes sense. I want to pivot over and talk about the multi faceted role that you have as the CIO. The CIO role in a tech vendor and provider is always a little more nuanced and complex because of the different you’re not only dealing with end user customers, but you are dealing with products that get sold in the market and so forth. So the role has got lots of layers of nuance to it that other you know, straight up companies outside the tech industry might not have. So I wanted to go back to 2022 when you first joined Veeam software, what did you come in with as your marching orders?
Yeah. So when it comes to being a CIO and a tech company, and you mentioned it, we have 5500 employees. We have 5500 of the smartest technical engineers in the world, right? So everybody, everybody knows technology, and it can know
more than you do, right?
Yeah, so that’s that can you know that presents its own unique set of circumstances, but yeah, when I, when I came in, I think Veeam has been on a rapidly growing trajectory, and so we were, we. To, I think we were just a bit north of a billion. We’re, we’re approaching 2 billion just within a couple years. And I’ve, I’ve been through this before, and as companies kind of go through that, that part of their journey, what got them to a billion is not what’s going to get them to two to five to 10 billion, the the startup, I guess you could say, or the early type processes and systems that were built, they tend to not scale once you get to to this kind of inflection point, which I tend to think of as around a billion. I’m sure there’s, there’s other examples or other ways to look at this, but that was one of my marching orders to answer your question, which was, how do we scale the organization from a technology perspective, but more so from a business perspective, so that we can continue to grow and and expand? Number two, I think, and this is always going to be my number one priority, is, how do we just safeguard our our technology, there’s nothing more important than our reputation in the market, and if we have a security event that can that can have a dramatic effect, not only on on your technology, but on your company and its reputation and its customers in the market. So that will always be my, my, my number one. But that was also one of the marching orders. And then two was starting to get a very clear vision around how we want to how we want to consolidate and gain insight on our own internal data, to to improve the operations of our business. So those are kind of the three, the three main pillars as as I joined a couple years ago,
right? And do you approach something like that when you a company, there’s the fast growth stage, that first, that wonderful first billion dollars of revenue. And then I’ve heard similar descriptions about companies when they hit the 5 billion mark or the 10 billion things have to change just in terms of scaling. You’d been through a lot of that kind of work at your previous technology company you worked at. Did that so did you arrive then with a framework in mind something, well, like some of the, I mean, other than the pillars that you just talked about, are there things that you know that were essentially, maybe not a burning platform, but something that really needed to be addressed pretty quickly when you get to that tipping point of growth at the billion dollar mark.
Yeah. So the the area that that we’re looking at intensively right now is what we call our quote to cash process. So how do you transact with your customers, from quoting all the way through to receiving payment, support, customer success and so forth. Beam was in a what got them to a billion was a very we’ve been wildly successful, but it was primarily a single product that we had, and our processes and our systems were optimized to deliver that single product and a single kind of licensing model, which was perpetual, as we’ve moved into subscriptions and usage based and service offerings those that addition of new business models, New licensing ways to license and support our customers has really been, I would say, under pressure based on the rigidity of how our processes and systems were originally designed, and so as a result, what we’re having to do is to rebuild it from the ground up, in terms of what I call our quote to cash process, all While not slowing down or impacting this continued kind of upward trajectory of the company. And so it is, it is quite the challenge. And we’re about, I’d say, halfway through that journey, and it’s something similar to what we, what I did in the previous company as well. So they all kind of, they all kind of go through this same evolution, or at least that’s been my experience, yeah,
well, and it’s true. I mean, Veeam was founded, I think, in 2006 so you’ve been around almost 20 years, which means that your original model was on premises, and you had mentioned that the real next wave of innovation has to come with a subscription model. That’s right, and that presents a whole new kind of an educational and a service oriented approach from your technology staff. So how do you, how do you handle that? How do you, what sort of new skills do you have to bring into an IT group? And it’s a sizable IT group. You have 300 people on your tech team. We
have about 300 people, Yep, yeah. And so, you know, used a term there a wave. We tend to think of it as waves as well. So we cut our first wave. Now internally, we refer to it as catching our second wave with with subscription based business. And so that’s even how we. Talk about it internally at fame and so when it comes to the to the skill sets that have have emerged, I think there’s a few things that we’ve done. One, we’ve tried to flatten out the organization there. There’s a there’s a skill set, and then I think there’s a structure and an empowerment that we’ve tried to do stay as efficient as possible with our people. So we’ve we’ve tried to flatten out the organization. We want to drive empowerment and ownership for decisions within the engineering teams of corporate technology. We want to reduce the number of hierarchical kind of steps for decision making. And so what we’ve, what we’ve worked really hard to do, is to flatten out that, or really empower the individuals. I tend to think of it as I have 300 of the smartest minds. They know more than me within within corporate technology, and I’m just there to create the culture and the environment for them to succeed. And so we’ve we’ve done that on the structural side, on a skill set side, we’ve really tried to focus on core platforms and rationalizing and consolidating down our technology. And as as a result, we built out teams that are really specialized within those those key platforms. And then there’s obviously the emerging skills that I’m sure everybody’s looking to hire, which is cloud architects, public cloud architects, public cloud engineers, automation engineers and so forth. So those are just some of the skill sets we’re continuing to add. And then the last area I think we’ve really increased is on data engineering and data analytics and so, okay, we’ve, we built out a team there, and and again, that’s a, that’s another area that we’re continuing to invest pretty heavily in, all
right? Well, I used to, it used to be a pretty short question and answer to talk to CIOs about how they had it organized. You know, there was plan, there was build, there was run. You know, in the old days, it was those three steps so, but these days, when I ask CIOs about how they have it organized so that it brings the most value to the business, the answers are always very different. They are so they are unique to each company and the industry it’s in. Tell us a little bit more about how you have those 300 brilliant engineers who all know maybe a little bit more than you do. How do you have them organized for optimal delivery to the company? And is there anything that you changed greatly in the last two and a half, almost three years that you’ve been there? Yeah. What was
interesting when I joined Veeam, we had two IT departments, and so had to, had to combine those two to create corporate technology. What was interesting is one was called Corporate Information Systems, and the other one was it so to create a shared identity, we we became corporate technology. I took the C and the T from each one, and so that’s why we have corporate technology. But the way that we’re organized internally is we have a group. It’s called the the business partners, and so think of them as they’re they’re really embedded within our lines of business, and they are there to work through technical solutions, road mapping, understanding the business objectives and outcomes we’re trying to save and then and achieve, and then determine how best we can leverage our existing tools and our existing systems to achieve those business objectives. So they’re very experienced group of people who truly is there, even though they they functionally align into corporate technology, I would say they, they dotted line, straight into the lines of business that that we’re supporting. Then we have an enterprise architecture function. This is another one that we’ve kind of built out recently, over over the last couple years, and these are really the senior level engineers that understand the entire landscape of our technology. And so they’re, they’re, they’re a shared service across the organization that people can tap into. We have a PMO that’s fairly standard in terms of running technical programs and projects. And then we have an enterprise application team, and that’s goes back to those core they’re organized by platforms. And so there’s about seven or eight pillars there within that team, such as, like a sales force, engineering team, a service now, engineering team, a workday. You know, the standard platforms that that most companies have, then we have a security team as well. Obviously, that’s a high priority that I talked about, a data engineering team. And the way that we tend to think about this, I think it’s worth commenting on, is the goal of that team is. We have all these data sources throughout our systems. This team is responsible for getting that data into the data warehouse in a curated manner and in a way that the business can answer their own questions. I tend not to want to have the reporting within my organization. I think there’s just too many questions that the business has. And so if we can provide that space for where the business has enough insight into how our data is structured, how how it looks, they can answer their own questions, and they can do that really, you know, pretty rapidly. And so that’s how we we have that structure. And then lastly, we have what’s called a performance and compliance team, which they do all of our Sox compliance, ISO compliance. We have licensing department level reporting and so forth. So there, again, another shared service that kind of spans across the the team.
Okay, that’s a thank you. That’s a great explanation of all of that, that’s, that’s quite a few moving parts, isn’t it? Right? Yeah,
it is. Yep.
The when you do, you find that that kind of organization and that the way it is structured, is that something that you encounter very similar setups at some of your customers, or some of those round tables you’re on when you were talking with other CIOs in the industry. Or do you have, do you have more intensive groups of that because you are a tech provider?
Yeah, I think that’s a, I think that’s a fairly standard model. You know, I’m just kind of thinking through I did forget one team. So if they’re, if my team is going to watch this. I better mention we also have a core services team, which is our service desk, and all of our infrastructure and so, oh, of course. So I think that’s, I think it’s fairly standard, and the reason why I like that is because then everybody understands their role within the organization, if you get into something that’s too, we’ll say too nuanced, or too new, or too too out of the ordinary. I think people have difficulty understanding how their how their roles are, and how they fit within the delivery. And so these are fairly industry standard. There’s probably a bit of uniqueness with it just based on where we’re at as a business, but it enables us to more clearly communicate and understand, you know, which base everybody is playing as we’re delivering our services to our to our customers
well, and we talked a bit about this before, and I want to dive into it a little bit more now, to the culture, the company culture and the culture within your corporate technology organization, and just also how that, how that has changed, how that is central to the way you approach your work as the CIO, because I know this is something near and dear to your heart from our previous conversation, yeah, Yeah.
So I think a bit of context too, on those 300 people we’re we are geographically dispersed and culturally different. So we have about a third of our of our people who are in the US. Then we have another, I’d say, two thirds that are in Europe, and there’s a few that are then kind of sprinkled throughout the rest of the world, as we have sales offices to support. But so we, we operate in a model where you have large centers on two continents spanning eight time zones. And so that can that can create its its own set of challenges, not only just in terms of the timing, but also just the cultures. We all have different backgrounds. And so we, we definitely put a concerted effort in terms of embracing that, in terms of of improving not only our team, but the performance of Veeam. And so when you when I think about my role as the CIO, I think of it in kind of three, three areas. One is to set the overall vision and direction for the department that’s obviously aligned with our business goals and objectives. There’s a lot of work that goes into understanding where we want to go as a company, how that translates into corporate technology and our execution priorities for the upcoming year and into the future. Then I look at the second kind of role, role that I play is building a culture of excellence and that empowerment that I talked about in terms of allowing the engineers to really make those decisions. I like to understand them. We like to debate them, and we but ultimately, want to make sure that people have a say in how things are executed, so that they have ownership and accountability for the outcomes that they’re delivering. And then the last kind of piece, I’d say, is kind of wedged in the middle. It’s just making sure we have the right people. I like say is, you know, we got the right people on the bus and the right seats. And so if we can do that. That when you have that a very clear vision, you have the right people in the right roles, and you built out that culture that that is empowering, and is a place that people basically want to be at, you know, a team they want to be a part of, yeah, you just unleash them, and it’s amazing to see what they can accomplish. Well,
and you had mentioned also that with a very open and collaborative culture inside of corporate technology, you do this weekly meeting where everybody, the entire department, comes and it’s 20 minutes long. Yeah, I was thinking about that. And you’re talking about a 20 minute meeting with 300 people dialing in from around the world. That barely sounds manageable. How do you make that work?
Well, I mentioned to the time zone, so we started 6am my time. I’m on the West Coast of the US. So, so I’ve become conditioned to performing at 6am in the morning. But so it’s, it’s 20 minutes, and we, we do it once a week, on a Wednesday, and just the the level of success of that meeting. So we have, like we’ve talked about 300 people, we get over 200 people, 230 a week that join that. And we’ve been doing it every week for two and a half years since I started. So we’re probably at 100 and, you know, 150 130 times of doing this. And so what people really appreciate is the connection that we have, not only within the team, but it’s a really good way of disseminating information. So if I’m in an executive meeting, let’s say on a on a Monday or a Tuesday, I’m I’m rolling that out, that information out to the department within a day doesn’t require emails, doesn’t, you know? And so it, it is a very good way to get information out to the team. We also use it to discuss challenges we’re having. It’s not all it’s not all happy, so to speak, but we will go through and say, Hey, here’s a problem we have, here’s how we let’s talk through how we want to, how we want to address it. We also bring in business leaders from around the company to share their priorities, how corporate technology can can impact their performance and what we can do to enable them to be successful. And so we’ve had just in the last, I’d say, six or seven months, probably a dozen leaders up to our CEO, you know, through our sales leaders, our marketing and so forth, leaders come through there. And what we try to do, too is to have a little bit of fun. So because I mentioned we’re such a multicultural team, we have I play, I’m a DJ in that meeting. And so before we start, people have sent me their song requests. And so I have a running list. And so as the meeting is getting started. I always join a couple minutes early, depending on the song length. That kind of time it right. And so we play that song that somebody has requested. And because people are from around the world, the songs will be in all different languages, and, you know, things we’ve never heard, but it’s, it’s really pretty cool people, people start dialing into that meeting about five minutes early because they want to hear what the song is and who requested it. And so it really does help to keep us together, because we are so geographically dispersed well,
and music is such a wonderful way to universal all kinds of yes, that’s making me think of Taylor Swift and the errors tour, which my my granddaughters, got into in such a huge way that I started listening to Taylor Swift. I’m more classical music myself, but
this week’s song was the Nutcracker. So we so it it’s also seasonal as well. Depending on what’s happening, somebody will request, hey, I want to hear a holiday song or but it’s, it’s been, I think when I look at building that culture, it’s been one of those pillars. And I have people from around the company wanting to join and and it’s a really good source of information within the company, and is
there a written component of this? Do you follow up with, like a newsletter, or is this all just happening in the moment? This is live. You can it’s kind of a streaming organization, right?
That’s exactly right. I tell people it’s low production value, high content. There you go. Oh, yeah. So there’s almost no pre work, yeah. And oftentimes, if there’s something really important, I’ll just have a list of handwritten notes and I’ll just talk and and so doesn’t there’s no presentation. Some teams will come and present. They’ll have a few slides, but we really try to keep it right at 20 minutes that’s enough for every. Everybody to get what they need, stay engaged and then get back to Yeah. Need to do, yeah. That’s
that is, that is no joke. I am. That is something I’m kind of marveling at here. I mean, consider this conversation today. We’re covering a lot of ground, of course, but it’s going to be, you know, almost an hour that we’ll be talking. And you know, you certainly can cover a lot, but it’d be pretty hard to get all those people to dial in for a whole hour, wouldn’t it? They would, let’s just hope they’re all going to dial in to hear what you have to say on this one.
Yeah, yeah, hopefully, yeah.
Now I wanted to ask you also, in terms of you’ve mentioned earlier about all the information and the expertise that you have available, just as kind of ongoing education for the corporate technology team. Are there AI tools that you’re using, like aI use cases for things to get you’d mentioned getting answers really quickly for people’s questions. It may not just be the tech team. It may be your sales folks as well. How do you how do you find the information you need very quickly inside Veeam zone systems. And are there AI tools that are playing a big role in that these days?
Yeah, so there’s a few things we’ve done. We’ve launched our own internal AI tool that’s within the company. It’s, it is, it is fenced off from the outside world so that there’s no information going out, out of game in terms of what the prompts are and what people are asking for. But we have, we’ve layered on. And this is a, you know, standard tool, chat GPT, that most people are familiar with, but it’s, it’s an internal use case for and so it, we’ve fed into it most many of our data sources within the company. So people use it. I actually was just looking at a at a readout on we get about 70 to 80,000 prompts on it just within a month. And so it’s getting actively used by people as a way to get information and as part of the transformation that we’ve been through, we have built out a corporate portal as well in terms of where all the latest information is within the company. I struggled to call it an intranet, but it’s it is a portal that everybody can go to to get the latest and greatest information and knowledge sharing within the company. Yeah,
calling it an intranet might sound too much like late 90s rather than a day, right? You probably got some youngsters on your staff that would be like intranet. What are we going to be next?
We call it web, yeah. We call it beam Central. It’s something that everybody can go to to get the latest information. Trainings, all of the recordings within the company are loaded, loaded there as well, so that people, if they miss it, they can go back and see it. So it’s a real positive impact. Too great.
Because I know I asked you, when we had talked before about this, you know, this 20 minute meeting that you have, and the the the importance of communication with all of the corporate technology folks on a regular basis. And I asked whether you had someone who kind of manages all that for you, like a marketing communication professional working with you on all this. And I think you told me, No, it’s just documentation.
Yeah. So, so we do within that performance and compliance team, we have a documentation group, and they’re fantastic. And so we do send out to the company, I mean, multiple times a month, quick updates. Hey, here’s the latest technology that’s coming your way. Here’s the things we need you to know. And so they do that, but they’re also really focused on building out our our Knowledge Center. As I mentioned, we have 5500 of the smartest technical people. They tend to want to solve their own problems. They’re not that’s we don’t have a community of people that want to call a service desk or a customer support line and have their they want to, they want to have the information at their fingertips, and yeah, and 90% of the time, or they can, they can fix their own problem. And so we’ve spent a lot of effort going through documenting, creating knowledge articles, creating key insights for our business that then they can tap into and solve their own problems. So we do spend there’s, there’s a level of structured communication, but then there’s also we balance it out with some unstructured communication as well, through those those meetings every week and things like
that, like the song of the week, right when you talk with other CIOs, and I’m sure the company cultures and how, how complex CI role, cio roles get managed inside of companies, especially in terms of communicating with everybody. Are you finding are a lot of those AI use cases popping up in in those areas? Is it because you’re already a technology company? So it would make sense that you would have, you know, very high tech methods for doing this. Are you seeing similar trends going on in the customers that you deal with, or the round tables that you’re on? Absolutely.
I mean, we’re all, we’re all kind of working through this, this problem set in terms of how AI can enable our business, it would be easy just to enable every AI capability that we have access to within our systems, but I’d go back to it would create a fragmented experience for our users. So what I have noticed, though, is a trend in the market, which I think is really promising, where you have certain software platforms who are historically, they would say, Look, we have, we have an AI capability within our platform, and it’s kind of within that ecosystem, just that that platform itself, they’re Now starting to to roll out API’s integrations into other platforms. And so they’re, they’re starting to become aggregators, so to speak, in terms of of how to leverage those tools, which I think is is super promising. You can, you can kind of focus in on one or two of those solutions and then integrate it with your other systems, and so you’re able to then kind of rationalize and consolidate those down. Yeah,
we’ve had a couple of CIOs who have expressed a little bit of concern over the proliferation of chat bots, and how you got chat bots for maybe you started out with three or four main ones, but now it’s a year later, and you’ve got 30 different chat bots and and then from there you go to having meeting a platform where all the chat bots can, you know, up
an aggregator,
an aggregator exactly how far along that curve are we and are you experiencing that as well? A little bit of an over proliferation of chat bots.
You know, we’re not, I think we’ve been really disciplined. And I’d go back to that. You want to focus on the customer experience. So we do have several chat bots, but it’s always focused on the customer in mind. So we have one that’s public facing, that’s more, I would say, marketing related, when it when it comes to to our that customer base, then we have another one that’s more support focused for our existing customers. And so we’ve, we haven’t had a, what I would say is an explosion of chat bots. We’ve We’ve kept a lot of we’ve been very disciplined in how we deploy them. And again, we’ve always focused on, what’s that customer that we’re trying to address, and what’s that customer experience? Yeah, well, with the company
as widely spread around the world as Veeam is with 550,000 customers being protected and served and all that. Do you have a typical customer? Or is it just, is it a universe, a universe of everyone that needs to look for data recovery and data protection solutions?
You know, we we span. I think what’s really unique about Veeam is our customers. We go all the way from SMB to mid market to to enterprise customers, yeah, and I think that’s what that’s really, you know, not to, not to tout beam too much, but I will on this one, that’s what’s really amazing about our product is it scales from startups all the way up to some of the largest institutions in the world, including the governments and so forth. So it’s, it is, it truly does span all customer segments, and that’s a that’s a really unique value proposition that we have to the market.
Okay? Well, when we think about your strategic technology and business priorities, which are usually joined at the hip anyway these days with most companies, but going forward into 2025 what are the what is shifting up or down your own CIO priority list, the things that are your your greatest focus, that are going to help the company continue to accelerate? Yeah,
so security aside, oh, that’s that one’s a given. Yeah, that’s a given. Wrapping up our quote to cash transformation, I kind of alluded to it. That is, that is really consuming a lot of our time, and it’s from a technical perspective, I tend to think of it as it’s pretty straightforward. We’re building out a new set of platforms. We’re going to have to migrate our data, migrate our customers. The real transformation there is on our business and the business processes that are going to change, and so that is because
you’re expanding, not. Just on premise products, but a subscription model that’s growing. Yeah,
and we’re also, we tended historically. We operated regionally. By that, I mean, like APAC, EMEA, Americas, we’re bringing all those processes together to have a global standard. And so as we’re doing that, there’s going to be changes throughout the entire organization. So that is, that is going to be number two, and then the the third one is, we talked about that second wave that we have here at Veeam with our subscription product, we are building out many new services on that, that platform that we’re providing to our customers. And so corporate technology plays a key role in enabling that, either through our online store, through our partner channel, through our licensing, through how we want to sell and support it. And so there’s a lot of work that we have to do to enable that next wave of growth, and what we call VDC, VM, Data Cloud. And so that is, that is the third priority for for next year. Well,
and you’d mentioned that you have to be the first and the best customer of Veeam products themselves. Yep,
we do. And so we the terms you’ll hear in the industry or like dog food, or drink your own champagne, or
champagne metaphor a lot more than the dog food. Yeah,
I’d rather drink that than than eat some dog food. But we, we tend to think of ourselves as the as the first and best customer, like we should and I, and I would challenge, or I would hope that all CIOs that are working in tech companies are their first and best customer for their product. We want to not only understand and deploy our products in very business in valuable ways, but we also want to be able to uncover any issues that might occur before it does impact our main customers. So we tend to be very aggressive when it comes to deploying our own product to make sure that that it works for us and it’s going to work well and great for our customers, yeah,
because, I mean, truly inside of Veeam, if, if you can’t make it work well, that doesn’t bode well for customers, right? Yeah, when it comes to innovation, is always a big area for CIOs. I find when I all the years at CIO magazine and then running our CIO events division, I would always build our agendas and our approach to the magazine issues around three really big topics, business strategy, innovation and leadership. Those are the things that CIOs kind of wake up thinking about, let’s say, and so when it comes to focusing the innovation work that you need to that you need to guide, or that you need to shape at Veeam, do you have any particularly special approach to it. Are there special groups or their task force or teams, or is it one of those? Everybody’s job is to innovate. How do you how do you work that at Veeam? I
think it’s it’s always a challenge, least in my experiences, you’re so busy doing the day to day work, how do you ever get time to kind of, instead of taking your your vision off of what’s the next step in front of you? How do you bring your aperture up and be looking kind of long term? And how can you make things better, as opposed to just operating what you have? Just some of the creative things we do, we actually are going through. It’s like, as we speak, we have an AI hackathon going on within the company, and it’s not to hack AI, but it’s what we’ve done, is we’ve asked people to volunteer, teams to volunteer from throughout the company, and then there’s and we have many teams that have volunteered, and they have a 48 hour window to say, look, what is the business problem we have at beam. How can we leverage AI to solve it and to come up with a creative, technical solution? Those then get submitted even up to our CEO. He’s on the, on the on the committee to review those, and then we’ll pick a winner. And then oftentimes that will then get get rolled into our into our technology and how we support our employees and customers. And so that’s one way to it creates dedicated time. It allows people to step away from their day to day jobs and just to think creatively about how to solve business problems. And I think that’s a really powerful way to go about that. And so that just started a couple days ago. Runs, I think through tomorrow, maybe they have a we give them five days to do it, to spend two days on it. So, you know, we have to be flexible with people’s schedules, but that’s a that’s a really good way of of doing that.
Just. Let you come in and be on any of those teams, or,
you know, they don’t. They’re probably too smart to allow me to get in there and do that, but, but we tend they kind of self organize, and then we have a we have a little reward and all that. And obviously, public praise is probably the highest reward that they’re that they’ll get through it. Oh, yeah,
knowing you’re working toward a purpose and knowing that your work is appreciated, it’s something that is so universal, and I feel like we see a lot more of that being applied to technology talent these days, because it’s so important to have all that great tech talent, whether you’re a tech vendor in the industry, or whether you’re a bank or an insurance company, I’ve had so many conversations about data engineering teams and hackathons that standard great big enterprises, you know, banks and insurance companies and so forth. Are there any emerging technology trends, something beyond AI that are of greater interest to you these days, or something that you feel kind of gets overlooked when we think about emerging technology and all the great things it can do in the world. Yeah,
I think we we fall into the trap of tending to focus on AI large projects, large platforms, things like that, where I’ve seen a real improvement. And what, what excites me is it’s the simple things that enable all 5500 beamers to do their job better. And what I mean by that is we’re constantly spending time on how do we create a frictionless environment in internal as simple as just how do you log in and access the various technical resources within the company? If we were to go back 1015, years, you had a password to log in. You had a password then to log into another system. You had a password to do this, and that next thing you know, you have on your iPhone and your Notes section, all your passwords, and it, you know, it just becomes, it becomes a, just a poor user experience. And so where I’ve seen it really getting get better over the last couple of years is we, we have passwordless authentication at this point within the company, which is great. People don’t have to remember passwords. They’re able to use biometrics and and those are things that that cannot be compromised. And once you’ve kind of authenticated in to the network you have, you have access to the resources you need. You don’t have to re authenticate. So it’s, it’s a, it’s just those little things that I think make a big difference in everybody’s lives. And so we’re constantly trying to improve the user experience internal and how people interact with technology. And so it’s, it’s been a, I think, a huge benefit for the company good, and I’m excited to see it continue to evolve and mature in that space. Yeah,
well, because I can remember from many, many years ago, all the talk about, you know, like password systems and trying to streamline that, and I can’t even remember all the terms for it, but we used to devote entire articles in the magazines about, you know, how you could streamline this? And it’s a lot more complicated than it sounds like, isn’t it? It
is, yeah. And so at the end of the day, we want people to enjoy. We want to create a cons, what I would call a consumer grade experience within the within the enterprise. And so that’s what we’re constantly striving for. It’s always amazes me when you go to, let’s say you’re at home, you’re on your, you know, on your personal time, and you’re interacting with apps and things like that, it’s a great experience. Then you get into your whatever company you work for, and you’re like, this is nothing like it. I need a, I need a 50 page FAQs to figure out how to actually use this thing, and so we want to constantly be moving towards that consumer grade experience,
yeah, well, and it’s the fact that all the consumer experiences are so much more streamlined. And I’ve heard it called, you know, like the amazonification of Sure, yeah, yeah. Once that happened, that has actually been a real boost in many ways, for it just growing in, I think, regard and popularity from the business side, because we need to do that. I had a
The other thing too, we we always want to strive for is, I don’t care where people are at or what form factor they’re using. So, for example, like the mobile phone, they should be able to do all of their work and whatever form that they want to so that’s another area that we continue to focus on. Do
you think we’ll get to a point where I just got into a new smartwatch recently? Yeah. Will you get to a point where you can manage that complex. Uh, enterprise processes on your smart watch. It’s all type. So
I’ll tell you that we just launched internally. So badging is another one that, again, like you have, you know, you have badging, and you gotta carry your physical badge. You can now use your smart watch proximity to the reader, and it’ll just let you into the door. Great. So although it again, it’s those little things that that make a huge difference to people.
Okay, final question to wrap up that I have for you here. Tell me what you have learned about your own leadership style, how it has changed or grown or morphed in the last several years because you were you led the technology operation at five. You’ve been at this for a few years now, almost three, I guess, there at Veeam. And how have you changed as a leader? What are some of the things that you’re doing more of these days and less of others?
Yeah, you know, I tend to think that, especially earlier in my career, you tended to have to think you needed to have all the answers, and that if you didn’t, didn’t have them all with your family. You know, at least that was, that was what I thought. And I think you tend, I tended to operate more what I’d call kind of I had to make the decision and then move that decision out to the organization. Needed to have the right answer every time I think, over my career, I’ve gotten a bit more we’ll call it confident in my abilities and maybe just self assured in terms of who I am as a person. So I tend to think of it as kind of a reverse pyramid at this point in time, where i i tend to really want to tap into all the people within the organization. Hear their ideas. We’ll debate them, as long as it aligns with our principles and where we’re trying to go, and our design principles, and in terms of where we want to go as a company, and we’re operating within kind of those, those guard rails, I think, really empowering people to think through the solutions. They can then talk to me, we’ll bounce through ideas. But then ultimately, I want that, that decision, to be theirs and and I think it’s it, it’s transformed the way that I have approached leadership, and I’ve seen just an amazing response from the teams that I’m a part of and and I think that’s that’s really been, it’s been great to be a part of, and I think it’s just part of My evolution as a person. Okay,
well, another very good answer. Thank you so much, and thank you also for joining me today for this conversation. It’s really been fun. Yeah,
I’ve really enjoyed myself. Thanks. Mary Fran, All
right, great. You are very welcome now. I hope that you all are listening and watching today. Enjoyed this conversation with CIO Nate Kurtz of Veeam Software, as much as I did. This episode is the latest addition to our extensive library of CIO leadership live podcasts, which includes more than 150 similarly fabulous in depth interviews with prominent CIOs all available on cio.com and on CIOs YouTube channel, as well as your most popular podcast platforms as an audio podcast, please do take a moment to subscribe to CIOs YouTube channel where, in addition to these dozens of conversations with US based CIOs, you can find Several international editions of this podcast featuring senior IT leaders from Canada, India, New Zealand and Australia. Thanks so much for joining us today, and we’ll see you here next time you.